American Jewish Archives Journal, Volume 64, Numbers 1 & 2

During his sabbatical year from Earlham, Bob had intended to complete the project with trips to HUC
in Cincinnati, and complete his and my joint research project on “Museums and Sites of Memory in
the Baltic Countries,” a project about divided memory that I must now complete alone. I am deeply
grateful to Rabbi Gary Zola and Dr. Dana Herman for their encouragement and enthusiasm in
bringing Bob’s article on the debate on slavery, Reform rabbis, and political action to light.
—Edna Kantorovitz Carter Southard
1The translation is from the Jerusalem Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Jerusalem: Koren, 1998), 147.
2Kaufmann Kohler, ed., Dr. David Einhorn’s Ausgewählte Predigten und Reden (New York:
Steiger, 1880), 5. All translations are mine unless otherwise specified.
3Ibid., 6.
4See Robert Southard, Droysen and the Prussian School of History (Lexington: Kentucky, 1995),
33–38.
5Bernhard Felsenthal, Kol Kore Bamidbar. Ueber jüdische reform (Chicago, 1859), reprinted in
Dr. B. Felsenthal, The Beginnings of the Chicago Sinai Congregation (Chicago, 1898), 48.
6David Einhorn, “Antrittspredigt gehalten am 4. September 1847 in der Synagoge zu Schwerin,”
in K. Kohler., ed., 8–9.
7Ibid., 10. Because these passages are important and hard to locate even in the original, I have
quoted at some length.
8 “David Einhorn’s “Antrittspredigt gehalten am 27. September 1855 im Tempel des Har-Sinai-
Vereins zu Baltimore,” in Kaufmann Kohler, ed., 41–43.
9This is how the book is usually referred to in modern scholarship, though “Olat Tamid” is actually
a superscription in Hebrew characters above the printed German title. To find the text, look for
David Einhorn, Gebetbuch für israelitisch Reformgemeinden (Baltimore: Schneidereith, 1858).
10Kohler, Einhorns Predigten, 22.
11Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 246.
12See Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (New York: Athenaeum, 1970), 20–21.
13A Jewish family in Rome, the Mortaras had their six-year-old son seized by the papal guard
in 1858 because the family’s Catholic nurse had him secretly baptized during an illness when
he was an infant, and canon law forbade Jews to raise a baptized person. The child was never
returned to his family. See Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 110–111; and n.22 below.
14See Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair. ‘Ritual Murder,’ Politics, and the Jews in 1840
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109–147, 233–258, 311–329.
15First initialed by Millard Fillmore in 1851, the American Swiss Commercial Treaty was still
under discussion during the Buchanan administration in 1857.
16For a brief account and a full text of the Jewish note to President Tyler, see Jonathan D. Sarna
and David G. Dalin, Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience (South Bend, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 126–129; Lance Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making
of American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 212–213.
17Emma Felsenthal, Bernhard Felsenthal: Teacher in Israel (London and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1924), 23–25.
18Ibid., 22–23.
19Alan Silverstein, Alternatives to Assimilation. The Response of Reform Judaism to American Culture
1840–1930 (Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England, 1994), 43–45.
20Meyer, Response to Modernity, 243–245.
21 Ibid., 216.
The Debate on Slavery: David Einhorn and the Jewish Political Turn • 153